According to my stories folder for the July 25th edition, I wrote 3 stories this week: Fairy Berry Festival, Rotary Girls School, and Summer Drama Camp!

All of these stories were given to me, though I can’t remember being worried about not having story ideas for that week either, so I think what must have happened was I had story ideas but they didn’t work out and I ended up just working on the ideas that were given. Actually now that I am trying to actively remember the week of July 21-25, I think I wanted to do a story about some sort of electricity rate reduction, but it turns out the reduction didn’t include St. Albert so I couldn’t do it. Yes, I believe that was that week.

For the Fairy Berry Festival story, the only thing I really remember is that when I asked the lady I was talking to for her position, she called herself the Director of FUN! and upon listening to the interview afterwards, the ‘FUN’ part was fuzzy so I thought she said ‘SON’ which made me wonder if she said she was the director’s son? Which then confused me further because her name was female and her voice was female so I was 99.9% sure she was not anyone’s son! I decided to ask my editor if he could take a listen and see what she said and he was about to when he stopped and said, ‘Wait this is – whatever the lady’s name was – from Prairie Gardens?‘ to which I replied, ‘Yeah’, to which he handed back my recorder and said ‘Yeah she’s the Director of FUN!!!’ …. LOL. And so she was.

The Rotary Girls School story was about the St. Albert Rotary Club and surrounding area rotary clubs donating a bunch of money to a Canadian/St. Albertan African girls school. I really can’t remember much about my interviews but I remember learning the lady who is like the Canadian ambassador/handles the donation money for the project, was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. I interviewed her father first (who was a member of the Rotary Club) and he told me that, so afterwards I was debating on whether I should bring up the breast cancer when I interviewed the lady. I mean, the breast cancer isn’t exactly relevant to the story, but also, from that it could deliver heartwarming quotes like ‘even though I have cancer I still want to help those girls in Africa’ and stuff like that, you know, (that’s how a journalist’s brain works I’m telling ya!) I decided instead of straight up asking, I would say like ‘is this project the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life?’ and maybe that would bring out the discussion, but actually I didn’t even have to say that because she told me herself without any prompts that she was recently diagnosed but she still plans on going back to Malawi (that’s the African… I want to say city? Village. Or like province in Africa, shoot I should remember this) to help build the next phase of the project soon and the cancer isn’t stopping her from doing so, so, that was really interesting.

The Summer Drama Camp is exactly how it sounds, there is a summer drama camp put on by the St. Albert Children’s Theatre each summer and this story was just to see how the camps are going, get a little background information, things like that. The camps are completely sold out, which is the story right there, but I also got to go down to one of the camps and take pictures for the paper and being around the stage area, watching the kids (well youth, it was the 12-18 year old camp) act and everything, reminded me of my Grade 7 through to Grade 12 involvement with drama class. I miss it, but I am definitely not hardcore about drama in the least.

Which wraps up that week, once again I’m sure there were moments when I was bored and had nothing to do, moments when I finished too quickly or worked slowly because I didn’t want to finish too quickly, moments where I was frustrated that people would not return my calls, and of course the pit-in-my-stomach feeling whenever Wednesday night rolled around where I’d have to stay late. These are routine feelings now at this point!

July 28th to August 1st recap coming up next!

Again, no ‘What I learned this week’ due to the fact that I missed the last month of recaps and can barely remember what I learned.